For Iranians, Trump's conditions mean "restoring relations with the US comes with a price tag of total loss of sovereignty."Mother Jones illustration; Mark Peterson/Pool/Getty

Devastating images and videos have come out of Iran since December 28, when a wave of protests began sweeping the country: dozens of body bags outside a medical center and security forces firing into crowds. 

At the time, shopkeepers in Tehran’s central market closed their stores in a movement that grew to hundreds of thousands of Iranians demonstrating against the government over economic collapse and rising prices.

“People are demanding economic justice, the end of corruption, and the strengthening of civil liberties,” Iranian scholar Behrooz Ghamari told me Friday. But “the news is dire,” with thousands of protesters, by the Iranian government’s admission, killed.

The government’s reaction to the protests was initially curtailed in part by White House threats of violence and political instability after Iran’s conflict with Israel in June, which culminated in US strikes on Iranian nuclear energy facilities. But on the night of January 8, crowds reportedly took to the streets after Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s deposed shah, called for support and insisted he would soon return to Iran to take power. The regime cut off internet and international phone calls and began the deadly crackdown on demonstrators.

The US has imposed restrictive sanctions on Iran since 1979, which President Donald Trump escalated during his first term after abandoning the nuclear deal struck by the Obama administration. Iran has been a point of focus for Trump, who has threatened further strikes and urged protesters to “Make Iran Great Again.”

To try to understand how the government and people of Iran fit in this picture, I spoke with Ghamari, an Iranian historian who has studied and written about the Iranian revolution of 1979 and its consequences for three decades. Ghamari, a student activist during the revolution, was condemned to death months after his arrest in 1981 and remained in prison after developing cancer, which went untreated until his sentence was annulled in 1985. 

Ghamari’s latest book, The Long War on Iran: New Events, Old Questions, released January 13. We spoke to discuss the book, current events, and the decadeslong ongoing conflict between the US and Iran. 

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. 

How are you feeling right now about the news coming out of Iran?

It’s a feeling first and foremost of sadness about loss of life. The news is dire. We don’t know exactly how many, but it seems like it’s in the thousands rather than hundreds. 

And a sense of anger at US interference. People are demanding economic justice, the end of corruption, and the strengthening of civil liberties. It makes it difficult to clearly understand what is happening on the ground and possible ways of supporting from the outside. Many Iranians who live abroad are watching how things unfold in trepidation, feeling that it’s very difficult to participate in a meaningful way that........

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